


what stranger miracles

by incognitajones



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (or maybe it is), F/M, Fix-It, Post-TRoS, That's Not How The Force Works, World Between Worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-19 01:15:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22602835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/pseuds/incognitajones
Summary: Ben can’t even manage to die right, apparently.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo
Comments: 19
Kudos: 50
Collections: For one is both and both are one in love: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	what stranger miracles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feritas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feritas/gifts).



> Based on the prompt: "TROS fix it fic with Ben waking up in the World Between Worlds after the events of Exegol, and him trying to get back to Rey."

Ben can’t even manage to die right, apparently. 

He went willingly, with the blood-warm salt of Rey’s tears on his lips, taking that one kiss with him into darkness. He wasn’t supposed to wake up ever again, or if he did, he was supposed to be one of those annoyingly serene and peaceful Force ghosts. Dying for something, some _one_ good ought to erase his flaws and turn him into the kind of person a Jedi should be.

But instead, he’s himself again, as far as he can tell. There’s no blue glow to his flesh, and it’s solid enough, if pinching and prodding himself means anything. And he certainly doesn’t feel peaceful or serene: he’s karking annoyed. What kind of wampa-crap afterlife is this? Is he supposed to wander around this forest forever—and why a forest, of all places? 

It reminds him of Takodana, or some of the parks he’d seen on Naboo: a wood of tall, straight, white-barked trees. They’re all perfect, though; there are no broken branches, no crooked limbs, no dead leaves. No wind moves the leaves or disturbs the glassy surface of the ponds, and there are no other living creatures that he can see. The total absence of any rustling or other faint noises of life is eerie. Every pond is a geometrically exact circle, shining like a mirror set in soft green moss. It’s all beautiful, but in an empty, soulless way that feels like a stage design, as though something is concealed behind the placid sheen. 

When he cautiously tries to open himself to the Force, though, nothing sinister is revealed. Nothing at all is revealed. He senses great power all around him, but it’s like a pearl or an egg: smooth and self-contained, nothing he can get a grip on and try to manipulate without shattering it first. And he doesn’t dare try that, at least not until he’s truly desperate. 

There’s no sense of direction to the light; it doesn't seem to be emanating from a particular source like a sun or moon. Ben looks up, but the overarching branches interweave together thickly and hide most of the sky. What he can see of it is a pale, even shade that could be cloud, or sky, or a luminescent dome. 

Wherever he is, he doesn’t want to be here. Maybe it’s where people who are stupid enough to hope that they won’t have to pay for all their mistakes end up.

He gets to his feet easily—all his injuries from Exegol seem to have disappeared, which is another confusing point—and chooses a random direction to walk in. What else can he do? Sit there and meditate for an eon or two?

What feels like a few hours of walking through the silent grove pass before Ben gives in and accepts that wherever he is, it’s not reality as he understands it. He’s not hot or tired, for one thing, or hungry. He isn’t thirsty, either, even surrounded by all this water. 

He should drink, anyway. He kneels on the thick cushion of moss (so unrealistically perfect that it doesn’t smear and stain his pants) and dips his hand into the closest pool, cupping it to bring to his mouth— 

_and he’s in the kitchen of his parents’ old apartment on Coruscant. He can hear them in the other room, their voices honed to that edge that always bit into his skin, even when they told him he wasn’t the reason they were fighting._

_And he, himself, is sitting at the table, both hands folded around a mug of caf. His own dark eyes regard him levelly out of a much younger face, his own ears—hideously outsized on this small head—stick out from under a carefully brushed cap of hair, with the child’s braid over one temple his mother insisted on._

_“You shouldn’t drink that, kid, it’ll stunt your growth,” Ben says, in an automatic echo of what his father always said when he caught him drinking caf._

_His younger self just stares back at him without any sense of surprise. “Are you real?” this miniature Ben Solo, perhaps eight years old, asks. “I can’t tell.”_

_Ben opens his mouth to tell the kid that yes, he’s real, but that none of the voices in his head are—or, more precisely, they’re all lies and he shouldn’t listen to anything they say—_

he’s back in the eerie woods, his empty hand poised above the water.

“Well. That was interesting.” His voice falls oddly, without an echo, swallowed up by the deep velvet moss. He sits back on his heels and stares at the pool. It’s only then he notices that it reflects only the branches of the trees above it, not his own face. He’s invisible; he might as well not be here.

A shudder passes trembling through his flesh from head to toe. He looks around at the seemingly infinite forest stretching away to an invisible horizon, interrupted by innumerable pools. Are they all portals to different days of his past? Or do they go even farther afield than that?

At least this will give him something to think about for the next few potential eons.

Ben wanders through the vast woods for an unknowable length of time, choosing a new pool of memory at random now and then to dip into. Each one is disconnected: he experiences a new time, a new place, for a few brief moments, though he recognizes only a few of them. Some are sinister, violent or war torn; some are serene and mesmerizing. Once the water trickles through his fingers, it seems, he’s back here in this weird place between places.

What would happen if he jumped into one of the pools? He squints dubiously at the shining surface of the nearest one, thinking about the invisible bottom—well, maybe if he flopped into one, in order to avoid a broken neck—anyway, if he managed to completely submerge himself, Ben’s willing to bet that he’d travel to that different time and place. 

He should try it. Force knows, he has nothing to lose. But as he stands poised on the bank, digging his toes into the bank and teetering his heavy frame forward, he reconsiders. Maybe just this once, he should try to reason things out before throwing himself headfirst at a problem. (He thinks about what his father, or his uncle, would say to that and finds himself smiling, helplessly.)

What should he do?

Ben doesn’t know. Could he find the moment on Starkiller Base, when he stood on the bridge and killed his father, and undo it? What would happen if he did? And how could that even work—would he have to defeat his old self, kill Kylo Ren, to stop it?

Maybe he should go back even earlier, and try to stop Snoke, Palpatine, whoever was pulling the strings, from gaining power. He could warn the old Jedi Order or his uncle about what was hiding on Exegol. Would foreknowledge alone allow them to defeat him, though? Without Rey’s incredible power, and his to complement it, maybe it wouldn’t have been possible to do anything earlier.

Or maybe it’s too late for any of that. Ben buries his head in his hands and squeezes his eyes shut in an effort to hold back hot tears of frustration. Changing the past seems like a dangerous and uncertain proposition. He hasn’t seen any portal that looked like the future to him yet… but maybe he should try. He could vault over all the failures of his past and try to start anew. See what became of the galaxy once the First Order was destroyed—if it was destroyed. He doesn’t know what happened to Rey after he saved her life. Just because they defeated Palpatine together, it doesn’t mean that the Resistance won the day. She might have had to watch her friends die, or been killed herself. Despair surges through him in a choking flood, rising to the back of his throat. Wouldn’t that be the worst possible outcome, and therefore the most likely for anything that he had a hand in?

No. Ben refuses to believe that. He gave his life for Rey, and freely. He doesn’t regret that choice—he can’t. Surely the Force wouldn’t be so cruel as to let him die saving her and then take her life minutes later. But in that case, he hopes she went on to make a happier life for herself without looking back. 

He could pick at random, a place and time where no-one knows him. The seductive thought of being Ben—just Ben—with no need to live up to the heroic legacy of his family, or down to the cruelty of the First Order… but somehow that feels too much like running away. And he has no guarantee that whenever he goes would be free of Palpatine. Maybe the wily old bastard could still track him down.

He fists both hands in his hair and pulls on it, trying to clear his head. Too many unknowns; it’s dizzying, overwhelming. Especially when all he wants to do, so fiercely he can taste it, is to find some way to return to Rey. His soul’s other half, the part that feels like a hole scooped out beneath his ribs, in the same place where she stabbed him and then healed the wound with her touch.

“You can’t change the past, Ben.” 

It’s his uncle’s voice, of course—who else would show up on this weird metaphysical plane to scold Ben.

“Who says?” he snaps back, automatically. “Who died and made you the expert?”

“Well, me.” Ben wheels around, and Luke is there in front of him. “I died. Though I don’t consider myself an expert, I have learned quite a lot about the Cosmic Force.”

His uncle isn’t a luminescent Force ghost either, but seems to be physically present. His hair and beard are lightly streaked with grey; he looks about the same age as when Ben was sent to his Academy, which at the time Ben thought was incredibly ancient, but now knows was only his late thirties. Ben extends one shaking hand to graze the sleeve of Luke’s robe. He half-expects his hand to pass straight through it, like the projection on Crait, but no, it feels like real cloth under his fingers…

“Here, in this place, I’m as close to having a physical being as I’ll ever be again. But I’m still dead.” 

Luke smiles at him, open and artless, and Ben can’t tell whether he wants to punch him or hug him more. Trust his uncle to gloss over the decades of hatred and blood between them and start lecturing him on metaphysics as though nothing had ever happened. But if he knows something about this place...

“Then tell me, why can’t I change the past?” Ben demands. “If I can just find the right moment, I could fix things—” 

“It happened.” Luke’s expression is unmoved. “You killed Han, and I died, and your mother died. None of these things can be changed.”

“Then what is the _point_ of this karking place?” Ben roars, flinging his arms out to encompass every single tree and pond. “Why am I here? Just so I can watch all of it happen again?”

“I don’t know why you’re here.” Luke twists his mouth into a “who can say” expression and shrugs. “If I had to guess, though, I’d say that it has something to do with the way you died: saving someone you were bound to by the Force and by love, and at the eye of a concentrated vortex of incredible power.”

Ben bites his lip and stares down at the intense green moss, every single frond of it fractally perfect, to avoid thinking about Rey in front of his uncle. Luke’s explanation sounds like made-up woo-woo banthashit to him; but then, so much of the Force is precisely that. “What is this place, anyway?” he mutters. “Where are we?”

“It doesn’t really have a name, though people have called it many things. You can think of it as a waystation, I suppose: a place where infinite places and times meet. Palpatine knew of it, and sought to gain entrance for years because he knew it could give him incredible power. But it is not easy for anyone to find, let alone manipulate, and it resists the Dark.”

“Am I not dead, then?” Ben holds his hand up and stares at it again; it’s just as solid and fleshy as before. He resists the urge to pinch himself again. At some point he has to believe the evidence of his senses.

“You’re not alive, exactly.” Luke sounds familiarly cagey. “But no, you’re not dead.”

“Can I get out of here, then?” Ben looks around, wishing for some kind of signpost or signal. “Go back and find Rey? Does she need help?”

Luke crosses his legs and sinks down on to the jewel-bright moss, his dull sand- and rock-coloured robes made even drabber by the contrast. “To return to the physical plane, as far as I know, you’d have to find a way out through a physical gate. And I don’t know if one exists on Exegol or anywhere else.”

“So I’m trapped here.” To avoid having to look at his uncle, Ben slumps to the ground as well and flops down on his back. He stares at the branches interwoven in perfectly symmetrical segmented arches, like the vaulted ceiling of a vast temple. 

“I certainly hope not,” Luke says. “You can’t stay here forever.” 

He sounds so much like the put-upon teacher of younger days that Ben is immediately thirteen again. “Why? Let me guess, I’m not good enough for your stupid Jedi afterlife.” 

“Because this isn’t a place where anyone can stay for any length of time. As I said, it’s a waystation.”

Ben closes his eyes, inhales-exhales to a slow count of four. “Then how in a Hutt’s stinking arsehole do I get _out_ of it?”

“Well, first, you have to decide where you want to go.” The smirk is clearly audible in Luke’s voice. “You could choose to let go of your attachment to the material world and join the living Force, like your mother and I.”

“Mom?” Ben jackknifes up. “She’s here? Can I talk to her instead?”

“Ben. Focus. Your mother loves you, and you’ll be able to speak to her at some point. But I’m the one trying to help you now.”

Ben snorts, but doesn’t make any other comment. “Okay. So I don’t have to… pass on. What are my other options?”

“Well, you might be able to return to the world you know, if you can find a way out soon. But this isn’t an unlimited time offer. The longer you stay here, the weaker your connection to the physical plane will become, until you won’t have a choice.” Luke hesitated. “I know you want to go back to Rey… but have you considered that it might be better to move on now? Lingering here could prevent Rey from moving on. She has her own life to think of.”

Rey wakes with salt on her lips. For an instant—half a breath—she forgets the last five weeks, and her mind flies back to that moment on Exegol. She opens her eyes expecting to be blinded by the light of Ben’s delirious, incredulously happy smile. 

Instead, she sees the dingy grey ceiling of the _Falcon_ ’s main berth. She blinks but the tears don’t keep coming, no matter how hard she tries to cry. Rey learned the lessons of Jakku too well; her body won’t waste moisture. The only time she cries is in her sleep.

If only she could remember that Ben was dead—force herself to believe it. Although she manages to do so when she’s awake, somehow her unconsciousness refuses to let the knowledge sink in. When she’s asleep, she forgets he’s gone. She’d swear she can feel his presence the way she used to, separated from her by only a thin veil. 

Rey sits up and swings her legs over the side of the berth, slumping into a lethargic, humped-spine circle with her head in her hands. She has to get up. She’s tried to stay out of the politics of the post-First Order regenesis; she doesn’t know the first thing about representative democracy or what the rump Senate of the New Republic ought to do first. But everyone seems to think she should have an opinion on it anyway. Rose and Finn and Poe will have questions and reports on dozens of planets asking for help, or advice, or requesting other vital things they need.

They do. And it’s ten hours later, long after a few gulps of caf and a hastily swallowed dinner of stuffed tubers (not that she’s complaining, not at all—abundant food and drink is still a miracle to Rey) that she’s finally able to slip away and climb to the top of the great bluff, to watch the sun drop, blazing, into a sea of fiery clouds. 

Rey prefers to meditate here, where she can see the sky but is still sheltered by the immense trees. She loves being surrounded by green and growing things and feeling the life of the forest all around her. She still doesn’t know if she’s doing this “right,” half the time; all of her training with both Luke and Leia was truncated, interrupted and compressed. But one thing she has learned is to trust her instincts. So she closes her eyes, and breathes, and draws her attention inward. She senses and lets go of the wind through the trees, the sun flickering over her face, the ache in her side from a pulled muscle. Everything floats away, as she hovers just above the thick carpet of leaves rotting into the soil.

This place is so beautiful; she wonders if Ben ever saw it. She misses him, in a way that’s almost worse because she never really had him. A few moments of shared triumph in battle, one embrace...

 _Ben, can you hear me?_ She closes her eyes and breathes, thinking of all the distances they were able to breach and cross: chasms of space, of understanding, of emotion. She reaches out—and touches soft, worn cloth, draped over a warm body. It moves beneath her fingers, giving the sensation of a sleeping person stirring. Rey? echoes in her ears.

“Ben!” Her eyes fly open, and the sensation vanishes. Her hand is hanging in empty air, clutched frantically tight around nothing. She wants to cry, half in frustration and half in vindication. Something is there, some remnant of him. She isn’t delusional. 

Even though he’s dead, if she could talk to him, see him in the way she sees Leia and Luke and some of the other Jedi she’s glimpsed watching over her with a vaguely proprietary air… maybe then she wouldn’t feel so hollowed out and alone.

She closes her eyes again and tries to centre herself. This time, before she reaches out, she calls to mind how closely they were tied together. How they were able to reach across incredible distances and touch each other, even pass things from hand to hand…

Hesitantly, she stretches her fingers out.

A warm, massive, calloused hand grips hers in return, hard. Ben is clinging to her as though he were drowning, squeezing her so tightly her bones grind together. She squeezes back just as hard, desperate to hang on to him. She doesn’t dare open her eyes in case it makes him disappear again, but she whispers, “Ben?”

“Rey!” His voice is real, it’s there, right beside her temple, and his other hand locks onto her arm. 

“Where are you?” she cries in desperation. So many things she needs to know, but that is the most important, the only question.

“I don’t know.” His voice is fainter, beginning to fade. “I don’t even know if I’m dead, or alive. But please, I’m trying—if there’s any way I can, I’ll find a way back to you…”

No. That’s not good enough. Rey had Ben in her arms, hers to love, for less than a minute before she lost him. She is not going to let him vanish again. She tightens her grip, keeps her eyes shut, and concentrates on the bond between them, clinging to it as she would a rope thrown to her if she were drowning, pulling herself toward him. She is not letting Ben go again. She is going to wherever he is—right NOW!

An instant of awful, burning pain scorches her skin and nerves like she’s passing through a bonfire, or back under the terrible rain of Palpatine’s lightning. And then she’s dizzied by the sudden absence of pain, falling forward, her hands still locked around Ben’s. 

Green, and damp, ripe smell of earth; soft light mingled with shadow. And Ben beneath her. She’s landed on top of him, shoving him backward into a plush cushion of moss. Wherever he is, it’s not dry, dead Exegol.

He looks exactly the way he did before he left, all those weeks ago. Same ragged black clothes with the tears and the hole seared through where she stabbed him. Same smile, broadening and shining until it blinds her. 

Rey is here: real and tangible, with her hair tangled and her lips chapped, enveloped in a dark grey wrap he vaguely recognizes as something his mother used to wear. She’s thinner and looks exhausted, dark shadows under her eyes, and she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. 

His arms lock around her and he’s yanking her to him, holding her so tight he’d be worried about crushing her except that she’s grabbing the back of his sweater and compressing his ribs with the force of her own grip. He can’t say anything but her name, over and over, ragged and breathy with unshed tears. He doesn’t dare let go of her in case she vanishes again, or he does: surely one of them is about to dissolve into thin air at any moment? But breath after breath, heartbeat after heartbeat, she stays with him.

“Ben?” Rey’s hands are roaming over his body, sliding over his arms, his shoulders, his chest, as though she needs to convince herself that he’s real and tangible too. She grabs his face in both her hands and kisses him like she’s proving he’s alive. He drinks her in: her taste, her life, her joy, her smile. 

Their second kiss could go on forever and still not be long enough, except that at some point Ben has to either breathe or pass out. He tears his mouth away from hers long enough to gasp, “How did you do that?”

“I have no idea.” She’s grinning at him, her eyes and nose scrunched up in happiness. “Does it matter? Where are we, anyway?”

Ben laughs in unfettered delight. “Luke was cryptic, as usual. But from what he said, it’s some kind of time outside time. There are windows from here to all kinds of past times, I just couldn’t find any that would take me to you. And he said there might be a portal back to the physical world somewhere.”

“All past times?” Rey stares up at him, her lips parted. “You mean I could see what truly happened to my parents?”

“Maybe, but it’s not something that's easy to control. When you touch the water in each pond, you see different times, different places. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell when or where you are... and they’re not always good.” He cups her cheek tenderly, echoing the gesture she remembers from their first kiss. “You might learn some things you don’t want to know.”

She leans into his touch. “I don’t think there’s anything I could find out about my parents that would make it worse. I might even see something that would help me understand why they did what they did.” 

“Shouldn’t we search for a way back to where you came from?”

“If you want to, I guess.” Rey shrugs. 

“Don’t you? I mean—isn’t there somewhere we should be?” 

“Ben.” She stares up at him, unimpressed. “Didn’t you just finish telling me that this is some kind of in-between place where time doesn't pass in the same way? And that we can find any point that we want to go back to?”

“Um, yes?”

“Then you’re lucky I don’t make you stay here for a year just so we have a chance for some privacy.” She wraps her arms around his neck and surges up to kiss him again, muffling his continued explanation of where they are. He laughs against her lips. 

“Believe me, you’ll understand once we get back,” she says crossly. “I'm not joking.”

“Get back where? How?” he demands. “You used the bond between us to get here, but how are we supposed to get out? Luke said there must be a physical portal somewhere, like a door, but I don’t know where it is or how we could find it.” He runs his hands through his hair, disarraying it like a hedge of untrimmed branches. “Rey, I don’t want you to be trapped here forever.”

“Ben.” She takes his face in her hands to make him look at her. “First of all, I’d rather be here with you than alone. And second, so what if it takes a long time to figure out how to get out of here? We have time now… literally, all the time in the world. And it’s not a matter of life and death any longer. Yes, I want to return to my friends and bring you back with me. But the war is over. You and I defeated Palpatine, and the Resistance destroyed the First Order. We’ll find a way back, eventually. In the meantime, I intend to take advantage of every second I have you all to myself.”

That obviously leads to more kisses, and more, until Ben has lost count. In the end he and Rey discover that they are certainly present enough in the body here to enjoy pleasures of the flesh. The moss is soft and yielding, but no more than they are to each other. They explore and touch, taste and shiver. There are some tears, and more laughter. 

He has no idea how much later it is when Rey suggests, “Let’s just wander, and see where we end up. Trust in the Force to take us wherever we need to be.”

Ben scans the never-ending forest around them, wondering. Perhaps Rey is right. He hasn’t felt any particular impulse or guidance from the Force, but then he’s always been strongest when he’s with Rey. Maybe together the two of them will find a way out, discover how to get back to their time and place—or somewhere else they can make a difference. 

She stands up, holding her hand out. He takes it and rises to his feet. For a moment all he can do is stare down at her, unbelievingly. If she disappeared this instant, suddenly drawn back to her own time and place, he’d still be happy. He had this moment; he knew that Rey loved him enough not to forget about him, to seek him out across time and space.

“Stop thinking like that, Ben.” She scowls ferociously up at him. “I’m not going to disappear. And if I do, I expect you to come find me, now that you know how it’s done.”

He laughs, helpless to keep his joy quiet. “I will, sweetheart. I promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know nothing about Rebels canon, so if I've completely screwed up the WBW, please accept my apologies! The particular form it takes here is based on comments by the series creators that I encountered while researching: that it would probably appear different to different people, and that the concept was drawn from the Wood Between the Worlds in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series.
> 
> The title is from Walt Whitman's poem ["Miracles."](https://poets.org/poem/miracles)
> 
> As always, englishable's thoughtful beta commentary was invaluable, and thanks to Ceallaigh for talking me through the World Between Worlds!


End file.
